u/Sad_Volume_4289

Music YouTuber Mic the Snare recently did a long video on The Beach Boys’ discography. At the end of it, he laments that the band was never able to find success without also playing to people’s image and idea of them.

I think about how their name, “The Beach Boys,” carried a fun-and-sun connotation befitting of their early surf rock stuff, but how Brian’s psychedelic experiments and everything beyond also had to be released under this name. I wonder: would The Beach Boys have found more success while also following their creative impulses if they had just gone by a different name?

In his ranking of the Best Actor winners of the 2010’s, Schaffrillas describes the ways in which the first Joker movie connects to Batman’s mythology “incredibly cringe,” apparently citing the plot point of Arthur Fleck possibly being Thomas Wayne’s child and how the Waynes are gunned down by a random goon in a clown mask. Speaking as a big fan of the first movie (I haven’t seen the second), I don’t really see why this is the case, and I find that the film's connections to the comics are part and parcel of how the film unfolds in a lot of ways.

Arthur learning that he might be Thomas Wayne’s child lends a sense of urgency and stakes to him learning his origins for both Arthur himself, who now has a possible avenue to lift he and his mother out of poverty, and for the audience who naturally want to know if Batman and the Joker are actually brothers. The fact that we’re ultimately denied a concrete answer to this, with the files he gets from Arkham conflicting with the letter to Penny he finds later, feels like an extension of the idea from The Killing Joke that his past is multiple choice.

The fact that Bruce Wayne’s parents are killed by someone who was inspired by Arthur also doesn’t strike me as being that egregious. The film is sort of presented as an Elseworlds story of sorts, told from the Joker’s warped perspective so that his “fingerprints” as it were can be seen on the events of the film (to the point of making the Zorro movie that the Waynes were watching a George Hamilton comedy). Having the Waynes murdered by someone wearing a clown mask almost feels like the Joker going “and this is why they should have been nice to me.”

But at the same time, I think there’s enough distance between Arthur and the Waynes’ murder that it can still be said to have been caused by something faceless and anonymous like in the comics. There are enough people in Gotham already disenfranchised enough for Arthur’s subway killings to spark the movement that kills the Waynes, and the film’s themes of an underclass being neglected by a wealthy ruling class are pretty easy to apply to Batman’s origins as it is (I don’t think this is even the first time Thomas Wayne has been depicted in an unsympathetic way). Especially when you consider that Tim Burton’s Batman outright makes the Joker their killer, I find the way that they tie him to their murder in this movie to be perfectly acceptable.

Both are softer songs from 1999-2000 by bands known more as metal outfits that proved to be their biggest hits.

On the episode of Song vs. Song that pits Jimi Hendrix against Creedence Clearwater Revival, Todd and Lina muse over how different Hendrix's path to fame and success would be if he were coming up in the 2020's. Lina concludes that he was talented enough, as well as good-looking and charismatic enough, to become famous today, but she theorizes that because people today don't get famous by being virtuoso musicians, he'd be a Twitch streamer and/or TikTok star in addition to making music.

It's interesting to think about, and it somewhat reminds me of how some people have said that Eminem is a rough approximation of the kind of artist that Elvis Presley might be if he came up in the 21st century, as far as being a white man who made black music.

Who's a musician from decades past whom you can image achieving fame and success in the modern day through different avenues as far as the music they made or the overall path of their career? Alternately, does this contemporary version of this musician already exist in the form of another artist or person like with Elvis and Eminem?